Thief (11 page)

Yet if he was rich, then those he stole from were often richer still, and their money was steeped in the blood of the innocent. Many times he’d stolen hundreds of millions from single crime lords who’d lived like kings. They had so much money they scarcely knew what to do with it. Yet they still wanted more, and the innocent would have to pay for it. All things were relative.

As a result he found he had an enormous amount left over to give to those more in need, and that did appeal to him. He knew too well what it was like to be poor and homeless, never knowing where your next meal was coming from, or if you’d find shelter that night. And there was a certain justice in taking the profits of his crimes and giving them to the victims of those he stole from. Besides, somewhere along the way he had found there was a greater reward in giving than in spending. And he needed all the reward he could get. Rage couldn’t keep a man warm all the days of his life.

In memory of Samantha he had started with alcohol and drug programmes across the world. And for her sister he had started sponsoring women’s refuges. Third world countries had needs all of their own and so benefited accordingly with hospitals and schools by the score. School had been his refuge as a child so it seemed only fitting he should return the favour.

In fact, his biggest problem of the last decade or so had been how to donate such enormous amounts of money without being spotted. For even though it wasn’t a crime to give, not paying tax was, and worse it was highly frowned upon by governments. Meanwhile the fame might well give away his novel revenue collection methods. Spreading his donations across hundreds of charities had helped a lot for the first few years, but now the funds were so large that even individual daily donations were significant amounts, while all the while the number of extra charities he could contribute to were reducing.

In time he realized with shock, he’d saturated the market.

In desperation he’d created new identities, Sheiks and Princes with more money than brains, and each in existence only for the few short months needed to distribute the hundreds of millions he had to get rid of. Each new identity had had a shorter and shorter life, as the taxman started spotting them more and more quickly. They sensed escaping revenue faster than a hawk, and tracked it better than a bloodhound. If it weren’t for the Swiss banking system and a thousand capable lawyers, he would have been in a huge pickle.

Then only a few short years ago, he’d hit on a new scheme, blackmail. Though not blackmail in the usual meaning. He might be a criminal, but it had finally dawned on him that he was also an international economic power. By then he was donating more in charity than any other nation on Earth. That had to count for something.

Assuming the persona of Screaming Lord Byron; he’d always liked David Bowie, he’d called off many of the dogs through their countries’ leaders. In any democracy the political cost of stopping a multi billion dollar charity would be too high, while at the same time the moneys for the charities would still have to be found elsewhere, and the war on drugs fought with ever more of the countries’ own resources. Surprisingly many leaders were pragmatic when they saw the costs of catching him. Life was still a risk, but not quite in the same way it had been before.

Now at forty seven, Mikel was a spectacularly accomplished thief, an academic and athlete, a martial arts expert and saboteur, a multi billion dollar per year charity and champion in the fight against crime.  He was also, he found, rather lonely. It was only the truth. He’d found quickly that while there was a huge freedom in being completely outside every system of law and ethics known to man, in being able to do nearly anything he set his mind to the price for it was terrible loneliness. In all his days, he’d never found a love to compare with Samantha, and even to her he’d never admitted his true nature, choosing instead to live for the moment, and simply love. In retrospect it had been a mistake, one he could never correct.

As he spoke, Mikel found himself in the position of a dying catholic in the confessional, and he spilled everything as though from a burst dam. In nearly forty years, he’d never told a soul what he admitted to her and the relief at finally letting all his secrets out to another was immense. But he had no fear. Deep down he knew that whatever else she had in mind for him, Sherial had no intention of sending him to the slammer.

More over there was something in the way she listened, that said she understood him, even if she didn’t agree with everything he’d done. And that grudging acceptance was more precious than all the money in the world.

“And your family?” As always he sensed what she said rather than heard it.

“I tracked them down later, much later. Always wanting to know why they hadn’t come for me when Aunt Mabel had died. I suppose I was bitter, angry. Still am a bit. But the truth was anything but what I’d imagined, and there was too much water under the bridge to repair things.”

“Turns out dear old Aunt Mabel told them she’d put me in a local monastery after I’d been so evil. Apparently I’d been stealing, getting into fights, and nearly killed some poor boy in a brawl.” Even after all these years there was still an echo of bitterness in his voice. He could forgive his family, for what they hadn’t known, but not her. Never her.

How he wondered, had his Aunt gotten on in the afterlife? Somehow, looking at Sherial, he knew both that there was one, and that it was probably nothing like he or anyone else had ever imagined. But that was an area he didn’t even want to think about.

“My father had come looking of course, months later when they found out about Aunt Mabel’s death. But that was many months later. Aunt Mabel was a recluse. No-one even knew she had family, not even her beloved priests. My family had no idea of the true situation. They started hunting down monastery after monastery, never knowing the truth.” What hell it must have been for him, Mikel had thought, to send your own child away for what you thought was the best, then never to see him again. Always wondering whether it had been the right thing to do, where their son now was and how he was faring.

“I should have told them the truth I suppose. But how? They believed so strongly in what she’d said, that what they’d done had been the right thing to do. How could I tell them the truth? That I was an abused child thrown to the wolves, who had graduated to become a world-class thief? It would have destroyed them. And me. I told them the monastery had moved on, that I’d become a teacher in Africa, that I’d had problems but sorted them out. I think those lies hurt me worse than any others I’ve ever uttered.” It was only the truth and yet it had been said with the best of intentions, and even now he wouldn’t dare undo them.

“We didn’t keep in touch.” And they hadn’t. He couldn’t have kept up the pretence of his lies to them, not for long. Not without giving something away, or feeling something in him give way. Lies had kept them apart, yet the truth would have torn even what little they did have to shreds.

“Did you find love?” Sherial didn’t say this so much in words as allowed for a gentle flowering of God’s concept of love to flow into his mind. It was a revelation to him, surely to anyone. Before Sherial had shown him, he’d never understood what love was, what it should be. It wasn’t even something that could be explained in words. It involved sharing - on every level. It involved giving, giving everything and knowing that you would receive it back with interest. There was passion and friendship, agreement and variety and harmony. There was the living of lives, by both parties for each other.

But above all he knew it wasn’t for him.

“Who could I love? Who could I place in that danger? Who could I ask to live with the knowledge of what I am, and lie for me? Else who could I both love and lie to?” And it was true. In order to love he had to trust. In order to remain as he was he couldn’t afford to trust. He couldn’t even retire, needing the reward of his good works to keep him running. His love life since Samantha had consisted of mere torrid interludes, none lasting more than a week and none giving him the satisfaction he craved. Instead he buried himself in his work. It was all he was, and perhaps who he was as well.

“I am like nobody that has ever lived. I don’t just steal, I deceive, I lie, I cheat, and I hurt people. Yet for all that I am a criminal I also stand in judgement over so many. Mankind’s laws, God’s laws - every law, I have broken them all and will do so again. Crime is more than just work for me, it is my life. I am caught in its trap with no way out, and I’m not sure I want to leave. I don’t believe what I do is all that wrong. But I know it’s not right.”

“I also take risks, sometimes terrible risks, and I can’t stop that either. I need the challenge. I need the rewards too. One day I will simply not come home. It is inevitable. But how could I leave someone else to deal with my fate? Perhaps never even knowing what had happened to me. I live outside of society, apart from everyone and everything else, manipulating so many to my ends, somehow believing myself to be above all their pettiness, even when I know I’m not.”

And yet while what he said was the truth, it wasn’t the whole truth. For he did desire. He would have given his life, his career for love. Yet millions would suffer for his love. Whom so ever he loved would also suffer.

“In all my life I’ve never told anyone what I’ve told you. I could never dare.”

The angel of the lord smiled at him then, knowing that what he said was the truth. Her love, her heart and soul told her that he was a good man, and more than that she didn’t need to know. It was a smile, a love, an understanding that wrapped Mikel up in it, completely overwhelming his paranoid defences, leaving him as a small child begging for the love and forgiveness he had lost so long before. She gave them all to him, as he cried out his pain.

A dark man walked across a marsh lands trail. The night was cold, and by the light of the full moon, the cold mist from the bogs could be seen to steam. About the man there was nothing that could be told. He wasn’t particularly tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, and in the inky blackness that surrounded him no face could be seen.

Unable to make out a single thing about him, Mikel would still have described the dark man as evil, if that word could have truly explained the feeling that emanated from him. The short hairs over every inch of his body were on edge as he watched him, his body recoiled instinctively; there was a foul stink in the back of his nostrils and an unpleasant aftertaste in the back of his throat. Evil was the only word that could describe what he saw in that creature, and he was terrifying.

The dark man moved quickly through the marshes heading towards a gloomy dank hill, with a clear sense of purpose. He looked neither right nor left as he marched, seemingly unconcerned about thieves or wild animals. Indeed Mikel knew, nothing else would be out that night. Nothing else would go near this creature.

Quickly the man approached the hill, and once there, along a narrow trail which wove its way around one side and past a huge rock to the cave entrance. For this particular hill was hollow. The man entered the cave with a speed that was surprising. There was almost no light, the path was both narrow and invisible in the dark, and the man never bothered to look at his feet and the path they trod. He knew the path well.

Once inside, the cave narrowed, at first becoming only wide enough for a single man walking, and then for one crawling. Light came from the far side of the passage, not a lot but enough to show that there was something at the other end. Suddenly and with perfect grace the man dropped to his hands and knees, a movement so natural he could have been born to move on all fours.

He travelled through the narrow passage to the other side, which Mikel saw opened into a series of chambers ending in a huge cavern. A massive internal room, large enough to have seated a concert audience. There were torches aflame, dotted all around the walls, their light shone on the stone behind, and cast  eerie shadows around the cavern. Stalagmites covered the floor; strange twisted projections of rock that resembled giant teeth more than natural outgrowths of sediment. The ceiling, however high it might be, was invisible in the dark. Perhaps there was no ceiling, only black starless sky in here.

But the group in the middle quickly dominated Mikel’s attention. A circle of hooded men, cowls and cloaks obscuring everything about them, waited, three layers deep. In their midst was an alter of stone, an enormous flat slab of rock weighing un-guessable tons. It stood in the middle, pressing down upon the earth that tried to bear it, like a giant hand. A massive force for darkness upon the good earth. Seeing it, Mikel had the instinctive need to curl up into a foetal position. He didn’t know why, but he knew he should.